Axios Systems’ Markos Symeonides reflects on a client’s remarkable journey to working from home (WFH)
Like many of you, my organization moved swiftly to transition all employees to WFH across our global business which I am pleased to say went very well thanks to the readiness and huge efforts of our amazing teams.
As we took just a moment to reflect on what we thought was a herculean effort, I learnt about something remarkably bigger.
Rapid transition
One of our energy sector customers was under pressure to protect business continuity by rapidly transitioning 60,000 office workers to home working. The majority had not been home workers before and 50% of employees stated they had no means to work from home.
With only 2 days’ notice before lockdown was to be applied, they had to act fast to ensure the workforce was able to continue working.
Employees without computers were issued corporate laptops with predefined images to ensure they had a standard configuration—this was to help the service desk provide support in what they knew would be an extremely busy period. If each computer was of a non-standard configuration it would have added discovery time to every support ticket, as well as making it more challenging to find solutions to technical issues. With limited resources they did everything they could to streamline services, configurations and support content.
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Accelerated roll-out
To accelerate the roll-out and to support adoption goals, employees were provided with standard device bundles including 4G dongles, mobile phones, and multimedia kits to ensure they were properly connected. They were also provided with certificates for authentication and remote access to the corporate network and secure VPN for some functions.
To ensure everybody had everything they needed, new home working services were deployed through the assyst service catalog, allowing employees to select approved apps with which to augment their standard configurations laptops—while keeping everything visible and controlled by the IT groups.
Satisfying IT requests
Within six days 12,000 IT requests relating to home working were logged, with a further 8,000 relating to HR around the changes as well. Through the rapid and extensive application of automation in assyst, our customer was able to satisfy these requests; many of which were handled by automated “zero-touch” digital service orchestrations which deliver digital services without human intervention via our assyst workflow engine.
To avoid a flood of calls to the service desk, employees were directed to their own tailored assystNET self-service web portal which empowered their employees to log incidents and requests, search FAQs and user-suitable knowledge, diagnose issues using simple tools, and share knowledge with their peers.
